The air buzzed with an electric zip-zip-zip as the System crafted Alarion's newest quest reward.

Years ago, he'd waited for each reward with bated breath and barely contained wonder. It had been magic, both literal and metaphorical, magic that had ultimately had him as its source. That childlike innocence had been left behind on the Trinity Isles, along with so much else.

Rather than staring at the materializing reward, Alarion busied himself fulfilling Bergman's request. The quest box would materialize in thirty seconds, more than enough time for him to scoop a few books out of the now jumbled pile of journals, ledgers, manuals, and fiction.

"I think there were a few more in the other-" Alarion interrupted himself with a lunge to the side, neatly catching the falling box out of midair before it could shatter on the stone below. "Room. I will check as soon as I am done with this."

"T-take your time. These are p-plenty," Bergman told him with a gesture at the small stack of leather and cloth-bound tomes. Then he looked up, with inquisitive blue-tinged eyes, "Anything good?"

Anything would be better than nothing, which was what he'd gotten so far. They'd looted their defeated opponents of anything of value, a handful of potions and a couple of enchanted weapons he had no use for, but he'd held off on actually looting any of the bodies, instead feeding their potential into [Unrealized Opportunity], bringing it to 43.2%.

It was a gamble. Possibly a bad one, but Alarion had his heart set on a larger prize. A stronger rank II fiend or revenant. Possibly even the boil itself, though it wasn't likely they'd be the ones called to kill it.

"Not sure," Alarion answered as he studied the box.

Exceptional Quest Box

Description: An Exceptional reward granted to Orphan of the Vitrian Auxilia for completing the quest Party Crasher.

Would you like to open this box? Yes/No?

It was not the first time that one of his quest rewards had called him Orphan instead of Alarion. Descriptions for items, such as the quest box, were based on the user's subconscious self-perception. He called himself Alarion, but almost every time he heard his name, it was Orphan.

Would it read Two-Thirty-Eight one day?

Alarion shook off the uncomfortable thought and turned his attention to the box in his hands. The quest had promised a randomized Uncommon or Exceptional reward, but he was unsurprised to see that it was the latter. It was always the latter. He wasn't sure if it was a perk of his luck or a benefit from his Aptitude. Either was good, as far as he was concerned. He'd learned how to provoke supposedly 'random' rewards from his [Self-Motivated] after noticing the trend a little over a year earlier, and he'd never looked back since.

Smaller than his usual reward boxes, this one was a cube barely larger than his fist. Its cover depicted the six collaborators sitting around the table deep in their game of cards. His [Spell-Storing Dagger] was at the center of the table, the rays of a [Solar Burst] leaking out of it.

"Kotone. Store this with the others, please," Alarion said, handing the cover to his familiar as it appeared and disappeared with two quick pops and a couple of 'Yes, Miss's'.

The stone lids were the only thing he'd taken from Trinity Isle that wasn't a necessity. He'd carried them around for months in his ruck, careful never to break them or to let other soldiers see he had them, lest they decide to play one of their 'pranks'. The engravings were a link to a better time, a more hopeful one, and he'd been unwilling or unable to part with them. Once he'd been 'blessed' with Kotone, he left his collection in her care, adding bits of his history one quest at a time.

He did not know what he'd ever do with them. Perhaps he would use them to decorate his home, though the idea of even having a place to call his own seemed so far away that it wasn't worth considering. Even so, he'd keep collecting them as long as Kotone had room left to store them.

Inside the box was a single clear diamond. Smaller than a fingernail, the box gave no explicit instructions on the nature of the gem, but Alarion instantly knew what it was for. He drew his [Spell-Storing Dagger] and reviewed its description.

Spell-Storing Dagger [Exceptional](Incomplete 1/6)

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Description: A spell-storing dagger created to match the aesthetic tastes of Orphan of the Vitrian Auxilia. This item is incomplete.

Requirements: None.

Type: Weapon.

Capacity: 1000 MP.

Enchantment: When casting a spell, the user may choose to cast the spell into the [Spell-Storing Dagger]. When used during an attack, either in hand or thrown, the weapon will immediately cast the stored spell on impact. Spells with a duration other than instant can be cast into the dagger, but any channeling cost must be stored in advance. Spells stored within will dissipate after five hours.

Alarion wasn't sure what it said about his aesthetic tastes that the System thought his preferred version would be a sleek, unremarkable silver dagger, but he ignored the possible jibe as he set the gem into one of the five hollows along the weapon's hilt. It fit snugly into the hole for which it was clearly meant, and Alarion reviewed the description once again.

Spell-Storing Dagger [Exceptional](Incomplete 2/6)

Description: A spell-storing dagger created to match the aesthetic tastes of Orphan of the Vitrian Auxilia. A single diamond is set into this weapon's hilt. This item is incomplete.

Requirements: None.

Type: Weapon.

Capacity: 3000 MP.

Enchantment: When casting a spell, the user may choose to cast the spell into the [Spell-Storing Dagger]. When willfully used during an attack, either in hand or thrown, the weapon will immediately cast the stored spell on impact. Spells with a duration other than instant can be cast into the dagger, but any channeling cost must be stored in advance. Spells stored within will dissipate after fifty hours.

The description was nearly identical, but the changes were significant. A tripling of the mana capacity would be crucial as he advanced into rank II, where spell costs tripled. Even now, he was testing the limits of his [Empowered Solar Burst]. With a base cost of 180 MP that quadrupled to 720, it already filled most of his previous reservoir. With the stable duration now measured in days, he could modify [Solar Burst] with a longer casting time for both higher damage and cost. Even better, he could charge the item every other day and have it reliably available without having to wound himself and drain a sizable portion of his MP.

All in all, a fantastic upgrade.

"Why w-would they be..."

"Something wrong?" Alarion asked.

"I am n-not sure," Bergman replied. He was alternating between staring off into the middle distance and looking down at his compass and books. "The distance here seems off."

"Off how?"

"It isn't p-precise, but a couple hundred miles, give or take."

"That would put them outside of the exclusion. Are you sure?" When Bergman nodded, Alarion asked the next obvious question. "Another ambush for reinforcements."

"C-could be," Bergman shrugged. "D-do you mind helping me get these on the m-map?"

Alarion joined Bergman on the floor. With little in the way of mapmaking experience, he initially reached for the book, hoping to read the coordinates out while the other soldier mapped them out. But one attempt at deciphering Bergman's minuscule handwriting dissuaded him. "How do you even write this small?"

"P-practice," Bergman blushed. "When I was little, one of my i-instructors told me my handwriting was too b-big. So I made it smaller. T-then they told me it was too small and... well, s-spite kicked in."

Alarion laughed. "I had a... similar experience."

His eyes flicked to ZEKE's bracelet, but if the Steelborn still had an opinion on Alarion's choice of weapons, he chose to keep quiet.

"So where do we start?" Alarion asked.

The next forty-five minutes were a crash course in cartography. Bergman explained legends and scales, and he showed Alarion how to read a compass, as well as the symbols on the map. Some of it was remedial, touching topics Alarion had learned under the Ordinates, under ZEKE, or during basic training. Yet just as much of it was fresh information that Alarion was eager to learn. He learned how to use a protractor and the value of angles and triangulation during tracking, as well as how to read elevation signs and the differences between regional and orienting maps.

By the end, Alarion was a machine, filling in markings as fast as Bergman could read them out. When they were finished, there were dozens of new points on the map that painted an odd picture of the enemy's location. Some were clustered around Carling Hill, adding yet more weight to their suspicions. Others were found clustered throughout the exclusion zone, including several groups close to the other Auxilia squads.

However, as they filled in the map, a concern arose.

Most of the items Bergman had tested carried weak sympathetic connections to their owners. Some were reports or letters left behind by members of the Bones of Ashad; others were notebooks, missives, and other scraps of paper that Bergman had pulled out of the 'treasury'. With such weak connections, he could get little more besides a general direction and distance. The direction was northeast, and the distance was 'far'.

The issue was that there were a lot of them. Fully half the markers they'd placed were 'far to the northeast'.

"C-can you get me that map off the w-wall?" Bergman asked. "We need something that goes further out."

Alarion quickly did as he was told, carefully unpinning the full-scale map of Ashad from the nearby wall and laying it down next to the rest of their work.

"Okay... so we're h-here," Ivor muttered to himself as he sought their location on the map. He referenced his notebook and plucked the protractor from their original map as he started measuring distances and angles. He marked one dot where they were, a second at the correct angle, then swung the flat edge of the protractor around to draw a line from one to the other. "They're along this l-line. And if we e-extend it a few hundred... oh."

"Oh?" Alarion asked, not making the same connection. He leaned further over the map, following the line with his eyes and still seeing nothing. "What am I missing?"

Bergman didn't answer with words. He plucked a ruler from his supplies and filled the rest of the line to its logical conclusion a few hundred miles to the north-east.

To the trade city of Ashad-Veldi.

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